Google bans all ads related to cryptocurrencies

Google has decided to ban all ads related to cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings, as part of its crackdown on the high-risk financial products. The search engine giant announced an update to its policy which says it will begin to block ads for “cryptocurrencies and related content.”

Scott Spencer, director of sustainable ads said, “Improving the ads experience across the web, whether that’s removing harmful ads or intrusive ads, will continue to be a top priority for us.” He further said, “In 2017, we took down more than 3.2 billion ads that violated our advertising policies. That’s more than 100 bad ads per second. We blocked 79 million ads in our network for attempting to send people to malware-laden sites and removed 400,000 of these unsafe sites last year. And, we removed 66 million “trick-to-click” ads as well as 48 million ads that were attempting to get users to install unwanted software.”

Earlier this year, Facebook banned ads for promoting financial products and services tied to cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings. The social networking company banned all ads from across its platforms including Facebook, Audience Network and Instagram.

After making the announcement, the shares of Bitcoin fell around 9.1 percent to $8,238, the lowest price since February 12.

Additionally, Google said it is also banning binary options, a financial instrument that either pays out a fixed amount (like a dollar figure or a share of stock) or else pays nothing. This type of asset is prone to fraud, and some jurisdictions ban them outright.